Three Keys to Effective Freedom-to-Operate Management

Freedom-to-operate is a murky world where the quality of the investigation greatly depends on the skills and resourcefulness of the lawyer or analyst doing the work. Best practices and standards of care are not very well defined and, even when systems exist, they are rarely adaptable to changing needs.

It is our mission at ClearstoneIP to gather, implement, and standardize best practices in FTO and patent risk management. This article is a step in that process and sets forth three basic foundational concepts for effective FTO management.

Well-defined product parameters. For an effective FTO investigation, it is important to define the product or project parameters at the outset. FTO is necessarily carried out with regard to a specific subject. Thus, the analyst should create or ascertain a detailed definition of the product, process, system, or future concept that is being cleared in order to memorialize the current state of the product. This contrasts with the sort of “invention harvesting” that might be done as part of growing a patent portfolio, where the goal is to identify broad inventive concepts and build on them in creative, but not necessarily actualized, ways. In FTO, the more that is known about the actual product intended to be sold, the more effective the investigation will be. Also, as a product evolves over time, past FTO analysis on that product may change radically. We should document parameters and features at a specific point in time in order to establish a clear historical record.

Patent analysis must focus on the claims. More critically than perhaps any other activity in patent law, an FTO investigation must be centered on patent claims. Prior art patents might include any number of embodiments, alternatives, and everything else under the sun in its specification, but the claims define the exclusive rights. If we can point to a single element of a claim that is not present in the product being investigated, then the claim is cleared and we can move on. There may be some exceptions to this when, for example, we’d want to monitor a cleared patent and its family when the subject matter is particularly close. But the point remains that infringement analysis is all about the claims. Losing sight of this, and using systems that make it difficult to access and act upon claims, can result in inefficiency and wasted time.

A mechanism to tie products to claim determinations. Building on the first two keys, it follows that the investigation would fall apart if we don’t use an effective mechanism to track, memorialize, and manipulate our work product. If we only had one simple product that never changed, this part wouldn’t be too difficult. But as products become more complex, upgrades and modifications are implemented, and product lines grow larger, our need for a robust system to handle the different permutations of product-analysis combinations becomes critical.

There is, of course, much more to the process, such as how to locate relevant patents, how to properly interpret patent claims, when to dismiss patents or merely flag them for monitoring, how to strategically assess relative risk among critical sets of patents, and more. We will touch on specific nuances and more in-depth analysis techniques in future articles.